Best Answer to “Sell Me This Pen”

I personally never thought anyone would actually say, “sell me this pen” in a sales interview. I was wrong. It will happen to you too. And to avoid panic, you should know exactly what to say back.

I am going to give you the right sales framework to respond perfectly every time. The point is, one day it will happen to you and I want you to be prepared. Because if you start to describe how smooth the pen feels and how shiny the pen looks, just like you saw in the Wolf of Wallstreet…

You probably won’t get the job. You can memorize the script, but more importantly, memorize the sales framework at the end.

Here you go…

CEO: Do me a favor, sell me this pen. (reaches across to hand me the pen)

Me: (I slowly roll the pen between my index and thumb fingers.) When was the last time you used a pen?

CEO: This morning.

Me: Do you remember what kind of pen that was?

CEO: No.

Me: Do you remember why you were using it to write?

CEO: Yes. Signing a few new customer contracts.

Me: Well I’d say that’s the best use for a pen (we have a subtle laugh).

Wouldn’t you say signing those new customer contracts is an important event for the business? (nods head) Then shouldn’t it be treated like one. What I mean by that is, here you are signing new customer contracts, an important and memorable event. All while using a very unmemorable pen.

We grew up, our entire lives, using cheap BIC pens because they get the job done for grocery lists and directions. But we never gave it much thought to learn what’s best for more important events.

This is the pen for more important events. This is the tool you use to get deals done. Think of it as a symbol for taking your company to the next level. Because when you begin using the right tool, you are in a more productive state of mind, and you begin to sign more new customer contracts.

Actually. You know what? Just this week I shipped ten new boxes of these pens to Emaar’s Head Office and 15 to Damac’s Office.

Unfortunately, this is my last pen today (reach across to hand pen back to CEO). So, I suggest you get this one. Try it out. If you’re not happy with it, I will personally come back next week to pick it up. And it won’t cost you a dime.

What do you say?

CEO: (picks jaw up off floor) Yes.

---

See how simple that was. The CEO loved it. Why?

Here’s the simple sales framework I used to answer “sell me this pen”. Memorize it for yourself.

1. Find out how they last used a pen (gather info)
2. Emphasize the importance of the activity they last used a pen (respond to info)
3. Sell something bigger than a pen, like a state of mind (deliver info)
4. Ask for the buy (closing)

Remember, it’s not about actually selling a pen. It’s about showing how well you can sell a product. And even though there are an infinite number of answers to this interview question, it’s easy to memorize a simple formula. Take 15 minutes today to practice the script above. I promise you will benefit. Plus, would you mind doing me a favor. Share this with ONE person in sales. It could save their career

 

Inspired by Sufyan Nouman

Management Sutras – True Leader

10 Attributes of a Great Leader – Excerpts from Management Sutras

A true leader lets go of control

He creates leaders, not followers. An important mark of good leadership is letting go of control. Are you in control when you are sleeping or when you are dreaming? Can you control any other function in your body? Your heart pumps oxygen on its own. Are you in control of your thoughts? You are not.

So, when you realize you really do not have any hold over all the critical aspects of your life, then you learn that the idea that you are in control is an illusion. And knowing this will relax you.

Sets Examples

A leader leads by example. He does not just issue orders. He teaches others how to do things by first doing them himself. A good leader creates leaders, not followers. He takes good care of those whom he is leading. He delegates responsibility.

Does Not Worry About Position

A good leader is well aware that the respect that he gains through virtue is very different from the respect he gains through the position he enjoys.

He knows that the respect the position brings is short-lived and temporary. Being a chairman of a committee or a president of another, being a governor or a barrister – these are all momentary experiences. Positions come and go. But the respect that he gets for being a nice person, for his virtues and attitude, is genuine. It lasts long.
Accepts Challenges

A good leader is motivated when there are challenges to meet. He is alert in times of crisis. He is not disturbed; rather he sees challenges as opportunities.

Balances Head and Heart

A successful leader maintains a balance by listening to the head as well as the heart. When he needs to commit himself to his work, he listens to his head. In other areas of his life, he listens to his heart.

Is Empathetic

An effective leader is able to put himself in others’ shoes and see things from their point of view. He is a good communicator.

Does Not Care for Comfort

Anything creative and dynamic can happen only when you stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone. You are often stuck here. You may think that you cannot do something. But if you make an effort and take that first step ahead, then you will find that you are not bound by your comfort zone. A good leader knows this.

Has Long-Term Vision

A true leader has a long-term vision and the short-term plan to work on it. He is prepared to put the organization, the country, before his own needs. That sense of sacrifice is needed.

Has Integrity

A good leader is satyadarshi (truthful), samdarshi (equanimous), priyadarshi (pleasant personality), pardarshi (transparent) and doordarshi (farsighted).

He has a mission and a vision and a spirit of sacrifice, compassion and commitment.

Does Not Let His Position Make Him Arrogant

A good leader does not exhibit that he is a leader. He becomes one among everybody. He does not think he is better than everybody else. He just sees himself as part of the group. A sense of belongingness makes him interact with the ones he leads. Developing good human relationship skills is a necessary quality in a successful leader.

The official guide for the top 50+ recommended product manager tools.

Collaboration

Confluence: Wiki tool to centralize your team’s product knowledge.

Google Sites: Launch an intranet for your company, a project site for your team or a portal for customers with our site builder.

Slack: Platform for team communication: everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.

TinyPM: Lightweight and smart agile collaboration tool with product management, backlog, taskboard, user stories and wiki.

 

Product Roadmap

 
Aha: Web-based product strategy and roadmapping software for agile product managers.

ProdPad: Lets you capture ideas and feedback, create product specs, and build product roadmap.

ProductPlan: Lets you plan and communicate your product roadmap.

Roadmunk: Visual roadmap software for product management.

 

Project Management

 Asana: A web and mobile application designed to enable teamwork without email.

Basecamp: A web-based project management and collaboration tool.

Blossom: A lightweight project management tool for modern software development teams that love continuous delivery & simplicity.

CodeTree: Adds extra functionality on top of GitHub issues to help with project management.

Jira: A flexible and scalable issue tracker for software teams.

Pivotal Tracker: A lightweight, agile project management tool for software teams.

Sprint.ly: Agile project management software for your whole team.

Trello: A tool to visually organize and see your project in a single glance.

Wrike: A work management and collaboration platform used by high-performance teams everywhere.

 

Productivity

 Evernote: Lets you take notes, track tasks, and save things you find online.

Omnifocus: A task management platform for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

RescueTime: A personal analytics service that shows you how you spend your time and provides tools to help you be more productive.

Todoist: An online task management app and to-do list.

Wunderlist: Lets you create and collaborate on to-do lists.

 

E-mail Marketing

 Aweber: E-mail marketing software that allows you to quickly segment your lists by subscriber opens or clicks, location, and even what pages subscribers visited on your website.

Constant Contact: Offers effective email marketing and other online marketing campaigns to meet your business goals.

Goodbits: Build newsletters for your team or customers in minutes.

InfusionSoft: Combines CRM, email and social marketing, and e-commerce solutions. It is most known for it’s easy ability to segment subscribers by activity to help you send very targeted emails.

MailChimp: Online email marketing solution to manage contacts, send emails and track results.

 

User Research

 Google Forms: Lets you create a new survey on your own or with others at the same time.

SurveyMonkey: Lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically and in real time.

Typeform: A form and survey builder that makes asking questions easy on any device.

UserTesting: Lets you get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use your product.

UXCam: Allows you to eliminate customer struggle and improve user experience by capturing and visualizing screen video and user interaction data.

 

Metrics & Analytics

 CrazyEgg: Visualize where your visitors click and engage with your website.

GoodData: A cloud-based business intelligence platform providing data management solutions for businesses.

Google Analytics: Provides data collection / management, data consolidation, data analytics, and reporting.

Kissmetrics: Delivers key insights and timely interactions to turn visitors into customers.

Mixpanel: An analytics platform for the mobile and web, supporting businesses to study consumer behavior.

Optimizely: An experience optimization platform enabling A/B and multivariate testing for users to enhance their websites & mobile apps.

Qualaroo: A qualitative insights SaaS solution that is triggered by web visitor behavior, providing intelligence that helps marketers better understand customer needs.

Segment: A single hub to collect, manage, and route your customer analytics data.

 

Design

 Flaticon: A search engine for 16000+ glyph vector icons.

Sketch: A really easy to use design tool for designers. Currently only available on Mac.

Noun Project: Search over 100,000 icons that you can drag and drop into your favorite Mac apps.

 

Wireframe / Mockups

 
Axure: An interactive wireframe software and mockup tool.

Balsamiq: A wireframing and mock up tool with a high focus on usability. Quickly come up with mock ups and easily share them with your clients.

Mockingbird: Helps you you create and share clickable wireframes. Use it to make mockups of your website or application in minutes.

Moqups: An HTML5 app used to create wireframes and mockups.

UXPin: Lets you wireframe any user interface quickly and easily.

 

Prototyping

 
Invision: A prototyping tool that lets you upload designs and add hotspots to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions, and animations.

Proto.io: Lets you create fully-interactive high-fidelity prototypes that look and work exactly like your app should.

Protoshare: An easy-to-use, collaborative prototyping tool that helps teams visualize requirements with website wireframes and interactive software and mobile prototypes while working together in real-time.

Google’s HEART framework for UI metrics

In order to pick the proper feature-level metrics, exploring
Google’s HEART framework for UI metrics may be a good starting
point:

H – Happiness Metrics (like user satisfaction scores)
E – Engagement Metrics (like average visits or uses per user)
A – Adoption Metrics (like new users)
R – Retention Metrics (like churn)
T – Task Success Metrics (like form error rates)

4 pillars of Product Leadership

The 4 pillars of Product Leadership are:

1. Soft skills
2. Business acumen
3. Domain knowledge
4. Technical skills

Product Management – Summary

 

1. Agile Methodology
a. A software development philosophy that emphasizes the development of solutions through collaboration between self-organizing and crossfunctional teams.
b. Agile Manifesto

2. Bugs, defects
a. An unintended or unexpected result or behavior in software.
b. The product manager is responsible for prioritizing the severity of the bug. Sometimes bugs are “production issues” and need to be fixed immediately while others can be shelved to be fixed at a later time.
c. Usually discovered by the Quality Assurance engineer, automated tests, the product manager or users of the product.

3. Customer Interviews
a. Also known as Customer Discovery Interviews
b. The goal is to gather the voice of the customer or user of the product.
c. This is also an opportunity to test assumptions you have about the end user and your proposed solutions for their problems.
d. Customer Development Interviews How-to: What You Should Be Learning
e. 12 Tips for Customer Development Interviews

4. Designers
a. Product Managers work with designers to create everything from the overall feel of the product to the minute details about the look and placement of buttons.

5. Developers
a. Product Managers work with developers to turn the product and designs into actual products that are usable by customers. b. Product Managers also help answer developer questions about priority of certain features or bugs and for clarity on certain product requirements as they arise throughout the development stage

6. Executive stakeholders
a. Executives at a company that have a vested interest in the success of the product that you are working on.
b. It’s important to get buy-in from executives because they often help with resource allocation and if you have an executive invested in your product then you can get things done much easier and faster.

7. Issue Tracking / Issue Tracker
a. A tool used by product managers, project managers, developers and quality assurance engineers to track the work they are making on a particular feature or bug

8. Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
a. The most important metric used to gauge the success of a product
b. Example KPIs: Revenue, User Signups, Churn Rate, Profit, Cost Savings

9. Mockups
a. Very early drafts to show the general look and some functionality of a product
b. Product managers put together mockups either themselves or work with a designer.
c. The mockups are living documents that change as the product requirements change.
d. Once the product is more fleshed out and there are much less changes to the mockups, the designer will invest time to create a high-fidelity mockup (for example, using Adobe Photoshop) which the developers use when building the product.
e. The most popular mockup tool is Balsamiq.

10. Product managers
a. Product managers lead cross-functional teams from departments like marketing, development, design and sales.
b. Product Managers are the CEO of the product.
c. Product Managers create the vision and direction for the products that they manage and then create much more detailed plans on how to turn the vision into actual product features.
d. Quora answer on: What is Product Management.

11. Product Roadmap
a. A plan put together by the product manager that prioritize and estimates release dates for the product’s features

12. Project managers
a. Product Managers work with project managers to get development work scheduled.
b. The Project Manager runs most of the meetings that the product manager and developers are in together and also helps move projects along by coordinating with the product management and development teams and removing blockers for developers.
c. Often called the Scrum Master in the Scrum Methodology.

13. Quality Assurance Engineers (QA engineers)
a. Product Managers work with QA engineers to help QA engineers test the code and features that the developers build.
b. Products are not allowed to be released if the quality assurance engineers do not sign off.

14. Scrum
a. The most popular implementation of the Agile Methodology. b. What is Scrum?

15. Stories
a. Also known as User Stories
b. A requirement document in Agile Methodology.
c. Different than the typical “requirements document” in that rather than talking about specific technical requirements, user stories are conversational sentences around the desired functionality.

16. Story Points
a. Story Points are assigned to User Stories.
b. Story Points are assigned by the developers working on the project and convey the level of effort they think is required to complete the particular user story.

17. Usability Testing
a. Usually performed by a User Experience Researcher or a combination of the Product Manager and Designer.
b. The goal is to evaluate a product by putting it in the hands of real users and observing the way they interact with the product.
c. Often times usability tests will give a user a specific task and then observe how the user completes the task, where they get confused and need help.
d. The output of a usability test is to uncover missing features, unused features, and points of confusion

18. User Experience
a. The overall experience that a user has with a product.
b. UX includes UI.

19. User Interface
a. The way the user interacts with the product.
b. The simplest case are the buttons and forms on a website.
c. User Interface is a combination of the ‘look and feel’ of the product and ‘how it works’.
d. The User Interface is heavily informed and guided by the User Experience research.

20. User Persona
a. A type of person that will use the product.
b. It’s an imaginary user that has a specific behavior, attitude and goal.
c. User stories should be created with user personas in mind.

Product Manager – Tools

The most successful product managers are organized so that your thoughts can be organized. If you have an organized mind you can communicate more clearly and being a great communicator is the key to success as a product manager.

If you aren’t naturally talented at communicating, you can go very far by focusing on being organized.

The best way to stay organized is to rely on tools to help you do the job.

Here are all the types of tools that most product managers have in their toolbelt and suggestions for apps and websites for each type of tool.

Feature and Bug Tracking

Sometimes also referred to as “issue tracker” or “issue tracking” tools. These are software applications that are used to keep a backlog of features that the product management team wants to create, the developers are in the middle of creating, or are created.

Usually a feature tracking tool integrates functionality to track bugs that are reported either internally or externally by users.

• JIRA
• Pivotal Tracker
• FogBugz
• More Options: http://mashable.com/2014/02/16/bug-tracking-apps/

Roadmap Planning

Roadmapping helps you plan out your product’s features over the course of months and even years. It’s important to keep an organized roadmap using a roadmap planner so you can get a high level view of what features need to be implemented and when they can be implemented.

As a product manager you’ll be referring to the roadmap frequently when internal stakeholders (like executives and sales people) and clients want an idea of what’s to come.

• ProductPlan
• OmniPlan

Wireframing

Wireframing is essentially a draft or a sketch of the feature or product that you’re building. You can use these wireframes to validate the feature or product before it get’s built and also to communicate how you want the product or feature to work and look to your developers.

• Balsamiq
• Mockingbird
• Pencil
• Axure
• Good old pencil and paper
• More options: http://theappentrepreneur.com/54-amazing-wireframing-tools-apps

Multi-Purpose Product Management Tools

• Aha!
• ProdPad
• ProductOffice
• ProductForce

Product Management – Removing Zombie Features

Usually no body thinks of removing old features which are not much used . Reason is mostly as we always concentrate on new and revenue generating features. Knowing the value by removing a old feature not in use is not thought about much.

There might be many good or bad reasons for remiving a old feature. Some of them which cross my mind are:

1. Simplified customer experience

Additional modules or menu items or settings make it difficult for new customers to find what is important. Even for experienced customers, every additional option adds “cognitive load” and makes a service feel less delightful, and more like work.

2. Reduced “load time” and increased speed of the servic

Sites with fast page load have higher conversion rates and more love from Google for search ranking. Most importantly, fast sites and apps respect our customers’ valuable time.

But, you may say, why not just hide the features for new or casual customers, or move them somewhere that only power users will see them? Unfortunately, doing so wouldn’t accomplish these other benefits:

3. Improved stability and reliability

Features introduce bugs unless they are regularly tested. The funny thing about software is that it often is intertwined in ways that make the consequences of changes difficult to predict. A decade ago, software companies would have employed armies of QA testers to do end to end tests on an app before releasing changes. The world is different now: we leverage test automation in addition to focused QA testing, and we move faster and introduce more innovations to market. However, despite best efforts, unintended consequences pop up, which take time and effort to diagnose and resolve.

4. Improved ability to innovate

Features add to code (software) complexity, and thus slow our ability to build or fix what is most important.

5. Ease of hiring and training new developers

Simpler code results in a lower learning curve.

6. Lowered cost of technology upgrades

When companies upgrade their underlying technology, features often need to be rebuilt. While I was at Urbanspoon, we upgraded the website to be responsive (so that our pages resize gracefully for tablets and phones). This required many if not all of our website features to be rebuilt.

However before you proceed make sure you have

• segmented your usage data
• informed and spoken to your most local and vocal customers
• tested thoroughly
• removed features in groups – impact is lesser

 

5 Awesome Data Analytics tools

1. Segment  – Collect customer data with one API and send it to hundreds of tools for analytics, marketing, and data warehousing.
2. Zendesk – Zendesk makes it easy to support customers when they need your help. Zendesk also makes it easy for them to help themselves when they don’t.
3. Stripe – Stripe is a suite of APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
4. Mixpanel – World’s most advanced mobile & web analytics.
5. MailChimp – Online email marketing solution to manage subscribers, send emails, and track results. Offers integrations with other programs.

 

Pirate Metrics as a simple metrics and analytics foundation for startups

5 key stages (AARRR) are

1. Acquisition
2. Activation
3. Retention
4. Referral
5. Revenue

By focussing on only these 5 key stages,  one can be effective in directing their team (or their own time) towards solving a distinct and actionable stage of their business/product.